A Day in Tokyo

On the way back from Vietnam, we were going to have to break our journey somewhere for a few hours in an airport to swap planes.  I saw a flight that gave us a 10 hour break in Tokyo, and figured that it might be a nice daytrip on the way home to Toronto.

After hopping off the plane at 7am Tokyo time, we caught an hour and a half train from Narita Airport to Tokyo.  The train system was fantastic although the ticketing machine wasn't the easiest to understand - you needed to know what kind of train took you to your destination, which is a bad choice of order.

Our first stop was Shibuya Square, which is commonly referred to as the Times Square of Tokyo.  As we were only there during the day, the effect of all of the billboards and neon lights is kind of lost, but here it is.

Shinjuku is home to the statue of Hachiko.  Hachiko is an Akita Inu (a bigger version of Jax).  The story goes that Hachiko was adopted by a Japanese professor, and used to meet him at the train station each day to walk home together.  One day the professor died during the day, so he didn't come back to the train station.  Hachiko waited for 9 years at the train station, arriving at the exact same time when the train was due every day.  His story is famous as a symbol of loyalty.

Shibas are a Japanese breed, and I was hoping to see some while we were there.  The closest we saw was this advertising for Softbank, who have a white Shiba like Jax in their ads.

Unfortunately our timing was kind of off for most things - I am guessing that Tokyo is a better destination in the afternoon and evening, and we were there in the morning and early afternoon.  This is Akihabara electric town - the nerd district.  There weren't many nerds around at 10am.

The Tokyo subway system was pretty awesome.  There was so much advertising everywhere though, including these ads that hung from the roof!

After our non-event visit to Akihabara, we visited Asakusa district, which is home to Tokyo's oldest temple, Sensoji.  I was hoping to see a Shinto shrine as well as the temple, as they are often co-located in Japan - people tend to rely Shinto for life-things and Buddhism for death-things, so they co-exist quite happily it would seem.

The street leading up to the temple was a market full of little items.  This was more like the Japan I was expecting to see :)  We bought chocolate-filled fish-shaped pancakes from a little store, which were tasty.

The temple gate, with giant paper lanterns and the guardian figures (in the box to the right behind the mesh).

The other side of the gate.  It was huge and really busy!

We decided to get an omikuji fortune while we were there.  This is a Shinto tradition and is probably the origin of fortune cookies.  We put in 100y and chose a random stick from the stick-shaker.  You then match the number on your stick to one of the little drawers, and take out the piece of paper in that drawer which contains your fortune.  My fortune was unfortunately a kyo - bad luck / curse.  Stephen had more luck with his and drew a middle-sized blessing.

After reading our blessings, we tied them to the scaffold - apparently doing this causes your bad luck to be blown away or your good luck to come true.  I don't remember anything particularly bad happening, so it must have worked ;)

The Shinto shrine - you can tell from the Torii gate and also because people worship differently inside them.  In Buddhist temples you mostly see just bowing (or the use of prayer wheels, although I didn't see any in Japan so that is probably a different form of Buddhism).  In the Shinto shrines, you ring a bell, bow twice, clap twice to attract the deity's attention, bow again, and then make an offering (small amount of money).  It was very cool to watch the ritual.

The pagoda - very cool architecture.  Pagodas are Buddhist, not Shinto.

After this, we took the train back to the airport and settled in for the long flight home.

Vietnam Part IV - Ha Long Bay

While we were in Hanoi, we took an overnight cruise around Halong Bay.  Halong Bay contains about 2000 limestone islands which have been washed away over time by tectonic and ocean movements.  Our small boat had about 12 people on it.

Our suite on the boat.

We cruised out into the bay and stayed there overnight, before chugging back in the next day.  

There were plenty of limestone cliffs to see, as you can tell.

A floating fishing village - plenty of people live out here on little boats.  Apparently inside the limestone cliffs there are deposits of fresh water (something to do with how limestone works), and these people live off seafood and water from inside the limestone cliffs.  Unfortunately, the water contains some sort of chemical that slowly poisons them, so they're banned from doing that now.

One of the locals, selling to tourists.  The submerged buckets are full of crabs, fish, starfish, other things.  The boat behind it is full of soft drinks and snacks.

The second day wasn't so bright and sunny.  In the morning we climbed one of the cliffs to get a nice view of the bay - that's our boat you can see in the picture.  Traditionally, the boats were all painted brown.  Apparently, however, a new local government official has been appointed by the party.  The new official decided after a trip to Greece that all of the boats should be painted white rather than brown and this would increase tourism.  He banned all non-white tour boats from departing the harbour.  So now, all of the tour boats that depart from the harbour we left from are white.

Occasionally you can still see some of the traditional brown boats, but they've come from another province further away.  I wonder if the white paint will actually help tourism.  There were a lot of upset people on our boat wanting pictures of brown boats next to the limestone cliffs.

After our time in Vietnam, we went for A Day in Tokyo on the way home!

Vietnam Part III - Temples

One of the cool things about visiting Vietnam was seeing the Buddhist temples and shrines that were scattered around the place.  I don't hold with the religion, but I really like the architecture of them.  Vietnam is (as far as I know) fairly unique in being a Communist country that doesn't outlaw religion.

A random shrine in the middle of the city - there was a crazy bustling street outside with motorbikes and honking horns everywhere, and we stepped inside the gate to a cool, green shrine that was much quieter.  Very relaxing.

Cool architecture!

Incense is a big part of the religion, and you can usually see it burning all over the place.

There were beautiful paintings outside many of the temples, like this one of a fish.

And many of them have beautiful ornate work, even on the surrounding fence.

This is the Tran Quoc Pagoda, which is the oldest in Vietnam.

Every temple complex had a little miniature rock garden like this in a pot sitting nearby - I'm not sure what the religious significance of them is (if anyone knows, please enlighten me!), but I thought they were gorgeous.  They all had rock mountains with tiny trees growing on them, and usually had temples, fishermen and water buffalo sitting on the rocks at various places.  The miniaturization was very cool.  We might try to make our own here!

My understanding is that part of Buddhism is leaving offerings at the temple, which tend to be sweet foods and drinks.  I have trouble following and understanding what is going on, because there seem to be a lot of different types of Buddhism depending on which country it's in - I have heard at various times that the offerings are to the person the temple is for, and I've also heard that it's for the ancestors.  Anyway - we walked a very long way to a special temple complex, and outside was a huge market set up to sell temple offerings.

Apparently the ancestors/person to which the temple was dedicated to really like Coke and beer.  From memory, the particular temple had something to do with some sort of venerated warrior.  Many of the other ones had choco-pies, sweet cookies/biscuits, or fruit.

One of the final places we visited was the Temple of Literature, which is the oldest university in Hanoi.  It  was again a tranquil area in the middle of the crazy city.  I loved this flower bed - I would have thought that the Chinese-style writing was too difficult to write in flowers, but apparently not! 

This is the Constellation of Literature pavilion at the Temple of Literature.  I still love the architecture.

A big thing at the temple is these turtles - apparently in the 1600s a king decided that he wanted to point out how awesome education was to everyone, so he had 116 turtles carved from stone (yes, they're all slightly different), which contain the names and birth details of graduates of the university.  Turtles are one of four holy creatures in Vietnam - they represent longevity and perfection.  If you're interested, the other holy animals are the dragon (power and nobility), unicorn (goodness and intelligence) and the phoenix (virtue and grace).

More to come in Part IV!

Vietnam Part II - Uncle Ho's Birthday

It was very convenient that Stephen's Mum moved to Hanoi, as this is the resting location of the last of the Big 3 Embalmed Communist Dictators.  Having seen Lenin in Moscow and Mao in Beijing, I was keen to cross Ho Chi Minh (called "Uncle Ho") of the list to catch up with Stephen.  Interestingly, Ho Chi Minh didn't want to be embalmed - apparently his will specified that he wanted to be cremated, but it was decided that he should be embalmed anyway. 

We were a little concerned initially as the day that we were planning on visiting him happened to be his 122nd birthday.  I was especially concerned as visiting rules forbade shorts - long pants were a requirement, in the 36C 85% humidity weather.  We decided to go first thing in the morning and chance it.

Here's the Mausoleum from outside, including part of the queue.  We did actually make it - we queued for maybe an hour, which wasn't so bad (after the 2 hours queuing to see Mao at least).  It was amusing, however, that the Mausoleum was the best air-conditioned place in the entire city of Hanoi, as far as I could tell.  As per usual, there was no photography of the dearly departed leader.

A statue of him in the museum outside the Mausoleum.

A painting of him.  I think he looks a bit like Vietnamese Colonel Sanders in this photo.

They were really keen on Lenin in Hanoi too - there was a Lenin Park with a big statue of him, and posters about him everywhere.  There was no mention of Mao though, funnily enough.

Next post in this series - Part III.

Vietnam Part I

We took 3 weeks off from our jobs in Canada and went back to Australia to visit family and friends.  It was nice to catch up with everyone, and a little bit funny to see that absolutely nothing has changed in our absence.  Life goes on, I guess.  After 2 weeks in Australia, we took off for Hanoi in Vietnam, to visit Stephen's Mum who is teaching English there.

This is the best photo I found of the traffic, but it doesn't really do it justice.  Most people have heard about Vietnam traffic - Hanoi isn't as bad as Ho Chi Minh City, but it was still a case of walking confidently forwards and hoping no one hit you.  No one did!

We visited the Museum of Ethnology (study of people) which is dedicated to the traditional lifestyles and history of the people of Vietnam.  Interestingly, there are 54 different groups of people living in Vietnam, and they each have different cultures - different houses, different boats, different clothing, different customs, different lifestyles.  Apparently many people still live their traditional lifestyle too.

The museum had some full-scale examples of the differences between different groups' ways of doing things.   There were a lot of boats, which ranged from one that was totally circular to this one.  That's Stephen standing at the other end of it.

The houses varied greatly as well, from ones that looked like a normal hut, to very long ones, to very tall ones like this one.  Again, that's Stephen standing in front of it.  The roof was a very skinny triangle.

Some of them had... interesting decorations as well.

Stephen was accosted by a camera crew while we were there - apparently it was some sort of special day for visiting museums, and he was on TV.  I think they were mostly unimpressed by the brevity of his answers.

We visited towards the end of May, which is the start of monsoon season.  For our first couple of days, it was around 85% humidity during the day and 37C (that's nearly 100F) - so you were constantly drenched in sweat.  At lunchtime, it tended to go from brightly sunny to this:

... which cleared up after half an hour and dried up within 10 minutes.  It didn't provide much in the way of relief, as it was just as hot afterwards.

We went to see the water puppets while we were there too - the story goes that traditionally they were performed on a stage set up over the flooded rice paddies.  The stage looked much like this (only we visited an indoor one).

 Here were some of the puppets.  We couldn't work out how they worked - we couldn't see any strings.  Apparently there is some sort of mechanism under the water which is controlled from behind that bamboo curtain by the puppeteers.  However, they move around a huge amount, and they disengage and reengage with other puppets (boats, people, fish, flowers), and they cross over other puppets all of the time too.  We are still scratching our heads over exactly how they worked.  It was a pretty cool performance - accompanied by a band of traditional Vietnamese instruments such as the dan bau, which sounded cool but looked incredibly difficult to play.

More coming up in Part II.